Engineering Newswire 97: Dragon Chopper Burns Down the Highway

Today on Engineering Newswire, we’re redressing a McLaren street car for the race track, making the virtual supercar a reality, and making dragons out of motorcycles with Orange County Choppers. This episode features:

From the Street to the Track: The old adage with race vehicles is that they act as testing vessels for the slower, more conservative, street legal versions in years to come. Not for McLaren GT. For once, road-based design has influenced the racer.

Built on the same carbon fibre MonoCell chassis as other McLaren 650Ss, the 650S GT3 has employed computational fluid dynamics technology to hone the aerodynamics. The 650S follows in the slipstream of its predecessor, the 12C GT3. In case you’re not following, in this sense, McLaren has given the 650S a GT3 makeover to make it racetrack-worthy.

3D-Printing a Dragon Bike: In response to a customer's ambitious request to design a bike in the shape of a Chinese dragon, Orange County Choppers (OCC) teamed up with 3D printer manufacturer Stratasys to make that dream a reality. 3D printing allows OCC to custom build parts with ultimate design freedom and durable, lightweight materials.

Virtual Supercar Becomes Reality: Designed as a virtual car for the Gran Turismo video game franchise, the Nissan 2020 was developed through a collaboration with the creators of Gran Turismo, Polyphony Digital and the PlayStation driving franchise. The car is very similar to its virtual counterpart, with influences from a variety of Nissan road and racecars, and was developed by a team of young designers at Nissan design Europe, who collaborated with engineers out of Japan.

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